Home Decor

I am pleased as punch to share my DIY dream catcher tutorial on UncommonGoods! I work for a public relations firm called Small Girls PR, and we recently threw a party for our client, She and Reverie.At the event we had a dream catcher craft station and provided the guests supplies and tips on how to make their own whimsical piece during the party! I’m a big fan of UncommonGoods, and wanted to share with their design community how easy it is to make one with just a few supplies. And just to add a cherry on top, knowing that UncommonGoods’ is very animal friendly, I created a fun vegan dream catcher tutorial! Below are photos and step-by-step directions for you to start making your own right at home!

Remember, you can substitute the supplies with any other arts and crafts you may have lying around at home. For example, if you don’t have felt feathers, perhaps you can use tassels or jewelry pendents. And if you don’t have faux suede you can switch it out with bright ribbons or earthy hemp cords. Have fun with this project and be creative! Below are a few snap shots from the She and Reverie event with the guests having a little bit too much fun making these dream catchers.

Inspired, but don’t quite have the time to build your own dream catcher? Check out UncommonGoods’ Dream Catcher Necklace.

As a fashion blogger at Kita Moda, I believe details and accessories are imperative. But this golden rule doesn’t just apply to my wardrobe, it’s important for my apartment’s design and atmosphere as well.

I moved into my own place about a year ago and over the recent months I’ve spent lots of time getting rid of my college Ikea furniture and replacing everything with sustainable pieces made for big kids. But of course I need stellar pieces to accentuate the fine furniture, right? This is where my obsession with UncommonGoods comes in. Every single one of their home decor items is a conversation starter. Packed with loads of color and unique textures, each piece appears to be from a far-off land making my home a bit like a well-curated mini museum. If you’re searching to brighten up your home with function and beauty, look no further. Take a look at some of my favorite pieces.

For the kitchen: A festive recycled glass pitcher and matching margarita glasses are a must for any party! My boyfriend appreciates the tastes of tequila, and I, sangria. And for when you’re not planning a party? These colored glasses inspired by Brazilian Agate will do just the trick.

For the living room:A beaded picture frame stands out against more basic wooden or metal frames. I love how these colors pop against all the white.

These Agate Coasters will make you and your guests want to use them. I like to leave them stacked when they’re not in use, almost as a mini sculpture. Architectural bowls make such terrific centerpieces. I’ve had my bronze Kelly Wearstler-esque one for quite a while but if I were to to replace it, I’d look to the Satellite Bowl. The stark black and clean lines just make such a statement.

For the bedroom: My entire bedroom is covered in jewelry. My dresser looks as though it’s in preparation for an editorial run-through with trays and bowls and cases full of pieces. My vanity and each and every shelf is the same way, covered. I simply need a closet dedicated to jewelry but until that miracle happens, practical jewelry boxes will have to suffice. One of my favorites actually matches the aforementioned beaded frame and it’s full of compartments inside.

And of course, let’s not forget about the art.

It was a bit like love at first sight when I spotted this Green Poppy Love Chair by Kate Lewis. It’s currently on my wish list, lets hope Santa comes through this year. It reminds me of a vintage dress my aunt from Greece recently gifted me, proving yet again, how seamlessly fashion and design go hand in hand.

Remember, it’s all in the details, so click here for more unique home decor ideas to add to your own wish list.

Research
I travel a lot and my plants tend to suffer because of it. Turns out it’s easier to find someone to take care of cats than plants – probably because the plants don’t complain as loudly as the cats do. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of gizmos to get the right amount of water to the plants, but they were all either ineffective, the wrong size for my plant, or just plain old ugly.

Hypothesis
Let me be the first to say that I was skeptical about this planter. It was a good size and attractive, but it seemed too good to be true. The last of my non-succulent plants just died (thanks, cat-sitter), which meant that this was going to be a long experiment. Armed only with slow-drinking succulents, I took a chance on this planter.

Experiment
May 2013: I got my materials together: some succulent planting mix, some decorative rocks, and some new succulents from my favorite store. I took the lid off of the water compartment to check it out, but neglected to put it back on when I started filling the planter with planting mix. Lesson learned: put the lid on because that planting mix goes everywhere and it’s really hard to remove from the water reservoir.

June 2013: I hadn’t checked the water in a month but the plants looked happy and healthy. The water level had definitely decreased, though it was hard to tell whether this was from the planter soaking up the water and it evaporating, or if the planter was delivering water to the succulents. I filled the reservoir and went on vacation for 3 weeks without leaving watering instructions for the cat-sitter.

July 2013: I came home to find that (a) the cats were fine and (b) so were the succulents. They were larger than they were when I left and the water was about half gone. I was starting to become a believer.

August 2013: Baby succulents began popping up – this was the clearest sign that the planter was delivering water as promised. Another sign that the planter was working: the succulents that I hand-watered were all near-dead from over-watering.

Conclusion
1. This planter actually works.
2. The planter has got to be much more impressive with something that needs more water. I’m going to get another one and try to grow some herbs.
3. Put some little plastic feet at the bottom of the planter to raise the planter a bit above the windowsill or table it’s sitting on. I found that the water in the reservoir affected the paint on my windowsill.

Hey you jewelry lovers, I’m Christina from Tales From The Thrift. I’m so used to showing off all my thrift shop finds that sometimes I forget to blog about the projects I conquer when I’m not vintage hunting! Naturally, my projects usually have something to do with actually organizing all of my random finds. Like a lot of other jewelry hoarders, I’m shockingly bad at storing my treasures, almost to the point of embarrassment. Every piece I own — from the fancy gems gifted by loved ones, to my huge collection of thrifted trinkets — gets stuffed into old jewelry boxes and dusty pouches or tossed haphazardly onto my nightstand before bed. Obviously, this strategy leads to plenty of tangles, tarnishing, tears, and loss. But finally, after one missing earring too many and some minor soul-searching, I realized it was time to become a responsible jewelry-owning adult and embark on my first-ever DIY storage project.

I kicked off my mission with a plan to create a simple display for some of my favorite necklaces. I began scouring a few local thrift stores and stumbled across some wood-framed, canvas art pieces–one black with silver handwriting, and the other with an abstract floral print–at Goodwill. (I ended up abandoning the floral canvas, and sticking with the black/silver piece, which features a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. If you’re curious, you can read it in full here!) I scored both items for around $4.

What you need: Other than some old wood-and-canvas artwork, just some nails and a hammer.

Step 1: Hammer your first nail at the top/center on the front of the wooden frame. Make sure you keep the nail exposed by at least a half-inch.

Step 2: Hammer a few more nails in a similar fashion, evenly spaced on either side of the middle nail, so you end up with a nice, balanced row.

Step 3: Put the display on your dresser or hang it on the wall, and arrange your necklaces. Enjoy a life free of tangled jewelry.

For rings, earrings and bracelets, I supplemented my DIY display with a few handmade jewelry stands and holders from UncommonGoods. UG’s gorgeous Hand Of Buddha Stand is perfect for my “real” jewelry that I wear daily, and I added a light blue Pedestal Holder and pewter Labyrinth Bowl to hold my other assorted baubles.

Of course, I still have plenty of jewelry stowed away and out of sight, but my DIY display definitely helps me keep my most-loved necklaces organized and easy to find. And best of all, my new set-up is as pretty as it is practical!

Mix and mingling at cocktail parties, couch lounging on movie night, and eating Sunday breakfast in bed just got a whole lot easier with Thomas Both’s Ooma Bowl design. “It struck me that all the plateware we use is designed for tables, yet often we eat without a table. So my point of view was to design something that is suited for eating without one, and to do it in an elegant way.”

Thomas earned his BS in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College and shortly after worked as a mechanical engineer for three years. Yet as a person who was a bit more right-minded, Thomas recognized that he held a creative heart, and wanted to finally wear it on his sleeve. He was admitted to Design School at Stanford University, which paved his way to teaching innovative designs at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. “Now, I work much more as a designer than an engineer, but both play a part.”

Observing small living spaces was how Thomas’ inspiration behind the Ooma Bowl came about. After speaking to people living in small apartments he was inspired by the idea of tableless dining. Thomas realized that most non-table plateware lacked a level of elegance, such as bad TV dinner trays or strange party plates. Soon, he turned these discussions and observations into a real life design solution.

Thomas believes that a strong perspective helps design a unique product. He didn’t want to just make a cool looking bowl; he wanted the design to be tied in with a direct purpose. In the early stages of designing the bowl, a friend of Thomas’ broke his leg and was stuck in the hospital for a quite a while. Because the Ooma Bowl was “a bowl that’s designed to be held” without the use of a table, Thomas took this opportunity to have his bedridden friend become one of his first experimental guinea pigs. “I called him up. While everyone else was checking if he was okay and visiting him, I asked him if he’d test out my prototypes. He liked the feeling of being locked into the bowl, not holding it but the bowl holding you.”

Thomas brought his designs to the next level of actual production. At first, he had no experience with ceramics. “Except maybe in grade school messing around with clay. It was a dining design project that just so happened to end up in a ceramic piece.” He had to learn about slip casting, working with clay, glazing, and firing all at once. After rough prototype after rough prototype, including failed plastic forming attempts, Thomas finally made the first buck out of REN shape into two pieces. “One side on a lathe, and the other just sort of by eye and feel.” He then glued the sides’ backs together and made adjustments. The next iteration he worked on was stacking and getting a nice feel in the hand, which was much more work than he ever anticipated.

Once the design was perfected into its brilliant form, Thomas found a manufacturer in Los Angeles, but just as it was a difficult process to design the perfect bowl, it was probably an even more nerve racking time to manage the products. “Selling and managing production, storage, sales, and shipping is a lot of work. I had way too many boxes in our living room for a long time. That part wasn’t so much fun for me; it was more of an on-going nuisance.”

Yet, after only a short hiatus, Thomas is proud to see that the Ooma Bowl sought its way back out into the world, licensed, and it’s now an exclusive item on the UncommonGoods site. Sarah Stenseng, our Senior Product Development Associate who attended Stanford with Thomas, worked with him to get the Ooma Bowls back into production. Thomas says, “The Ooma bowl would probably still be sitting on the sidelines if it wasn’t for UncommonGoods.”

Thomas’ advice for designers who are producing a product from just a simple idea is to “get engaged and excited about how people do things and how they think within a certain domain , and pay attention. Opportunities will emerge. Then you have to try things. Make stuff. It can be crappy, you’re just working on the concept. Work your way to a product idea that you’re excited about and other people love. Then you can bring more refinement to it and move toward manufacturing.”

The moment I saw Jeff Knight’s Nimbus Cloud Serving Board in our Woodworking Design Challenge I started rooting for it. I love the combination of sturdy, yet beautiful, hard maple and the whimsical cloud shape of the board–and the little raindrop serving trays are the perfect finishing touch to make this simultaneously playful and functional piece truly uncommon. When I found out that Jeff is from my hometown, I crossed my fingers a little harder, even though I was pretty confident our voting community would make sure the design made it to the final round. In the end, our community and our judges agreed with me that this wooden work of art was perfect for our assortment.

Since I happened to be planning a trip back home to Fargo, North Dakota, I HAD to jump on the opportunity to see where this winning design was born. Upon my arrival Jeff, in true Midwestern fashion, graciously welcomed me into his wood shop, offered up coffee, and gave me a tour of a beautifully sawdusty space called DIY Wood Studio, a shared woodworking environment filled will tools of all sizes, projects in the works, and a lot of inspiration.

I recently moved into an adorable brownstone in Brooklyn, and as much as I love my faux fireplace against a brick wall and my fabulous French double doors, I admit that my white walls are currently screaming for attention and my shelves are yearning for some sweet, sweet lovin’. Before I moved back to NYC, I was traveling for a few years and I never got a real chance to make my home areal home that reflected my personality while living abroad. This was due to the fact that I was either stuck inside a tiny chambre de bonne in Paris or my toilet was less than a foot away from my shower-head in South Korea. (Yes, everything got wet whenever I showered. I still shudder when I think about it.) One of the reasons why I moved back to the states was because I wanted my love of home décor to go beyond the limits of the space of a shoe box, and to ignite my dying creative spirit through endless tribal-print toss pillows and painted mason jars. Now that I’m finally in a decent sized apartment, it’s time to tackle a few do-it-yourself projects to spruce up my living space and to finally cross out “Decorate my home to make the holy Martha Stewart jealous” off my bucket list. Below are my top 6 ideas I’ve found online (AKA: procrastinating on Pinterest) that I hope to complete before the end of summer. They’re fun, easy, and won’t break the bank!

1. Wine Cork Magnets – For my severe love of red wine and DIY projects that take under 30 minutes to complete, these wine cork magnets made it to the very top of my list. I open my fridge every day, and even though half the time the inside is empty, at least these adorable wine corks will have me feeling quite sophisticated. (And okay with myself that the groceries weren’t done for the week.)

Not to sound overly girlie or cliché, but getting engaged was absolutely one of the happiest, most blissful moments (weekends) of my life. And sure, now five months later I am entirely wrapped up in comparing caterers and photographers and yes trying on many, many white dresses and making many, many decisions (who knew there were so many decisions to make?). It’s been a total blast. As it turns out, I love planning! Now, that’s not to say I haven’t had my moments – total emotional breakdowns/spazz moments … I am somewhat comforted to know that I have found this to be a shared experience among just about all my engaged/married friends. (This is a highly emotional time, people!) but I am getting better at thinking big picture and turning any moments of stress into excitement. I think by the time our wedding date rolls around, I’ll have this down to a science. Until then: lots of deep breaths, long runs and on certain nights: copious amounts of wine.

As for some of those details – while we are taking some liberties with certain “traditions”, building a registry was one of the most fun projects I have worked on during this flurry of planning – and we approached this in a somewhat traditional sense – all while infusing our personalities into it from bottom to top. I have been to enough weddings in the past 2-3 years to see several approaches to registries, and being in the retail business and overall a product-passionate person, I am at somewhat of an advantage as to knowing what is in the competitive landscape for products. Here are some tips of the trade and from my experience that might be useful for anyone who is just getting started in this:

(1.) SET UP MORE THAN ONE REGISTRY:
We tried a few different approaches, and in the end, we chose to register with four different sites. We wanted to make sure we gathered the best products from the best sources to match our taste and needs, rather than trying to retro-fit into one or two retailers who might not have exactly what we wanted. Not to mention, a lot of traditional retailers don’t carry the really unique, wow items to add personality into your home. I also really love when my friends register at a few different places, so that I can mix and match gifts and price points to give them what feels like a cohesive package of goodies.

The first place we registered with was the service Knack. We used this to pull in items from sites that did not have their own registry or if there were not enough items on the site to rationalize an entire registry. I had used Knack for friends’ registries and found it exciting to see items aggregated from funky, smaller stores. I liked that it opened up the market for registering outside of traditional retailers, but the checkout process was somewhat laborious to use. (E.g.: to purchase an item, you click into the item page from the main registry page, select “Buy Now” – which then takes you to the separate retailer site to purchase. Once you purchase it through the other retailer (and have to enter in all address information, etc), then you have to click back to Knack to tell the service you purchased it. Not the easiest, I did not check out correctly the first time I used it and I consider myself a pretty tech-savvy person! After imagining some of the less tech-savvy folks in our life trying to use this service, I decided to break out what I could onto separate, more traditional registry sites.

Your wedding registry is an opportunity to show off your style and point to the “wow” items you’re dreaming of.

(2.) ASK FOR HELP!
After building out registries which solved for pots and pans, plates and cups, coffee makers and cookbooks, I thought I had thought of everything. Well, thankfully, I sent our registry links around to my mom, sister-in-law, and my fiancé’s mom. Definitely ask around, while there are tons of wedding planning books and websites, I found getting advice from the people who know us best to be the most helpful. They knew we didn’t need overly ornate plates or silver serving pieces, but they also jumped on the fact that I had missed sheets and towels and silverware.

(3.) MAKE SURE TO GET YOUR PARTNER’S SIGN OFF
Building the registry was something I decided to take on and consult with my partner after I was more or less finished. I built out the above described registries, added the links to our wedding website, and before I knew it our family and friends were jumping on items as engagement gifts. (What a lovely surprise!) Luckily, my fiancé and I definitely share a similar taste level and aesthetic so I was not too far off. However, once I saw people starting to buy items, I decided I ought to run the registries by my fiancé. The process of editing was funny, while I tried to pretty much stick to the essentials, I may have tried to slide in a few decorative accents that he quickly and swiftly gave the axe (a handmade bell, Katie, really??). So, make sure you are BOTH on the same page to avoid glares from your one and only after the wedding.

Overall, building a registry is a super fun project; I think this is because it allows you to start picturing what this next phase of our life might look like. Sure, we have lived together for going on 4 years now and have stocked cabinets, but our kitchen is largely a patchwork style collection of cast off odds and ends from our moms’ kitchens (happy to clean out their pantries), plates we picked up from the free shop at a oft-visited dump in New Hampshire, and–most notably–our collection of pots and pans from a particularly successful yard sale day. For two people who love to cook and entertain, curating a collection of items to use on a daily basis was an exciting foray into – dare I say – true adulthood. Because really, I think it’s when you own your first Cuisinart that you can call yourself an adult. But it was during the selection of goods that I realized we could hand pick the items that we would use not only to use to heat up soup on a typical Monday night of netflix-marathon watching, but to make our home with, to serve holiday dinners with our families, and in someway, to define who we are as a couple and how we want to make our home. That being said, I believe our kitchen, and our home will always be a patchwork of odds and ends, but at least now we might have matching tops to all our pots and a functioning coffee maker!

My biggest words of advice: Make it about who you are as a couple. If you never bake, don’t register for bake ware; if you aren’t the formal type, register for some high quality, but funkier versions of things – everyone needs plates to eat off of, you don’t need to go for the super expensive kind if they don’t suit your lifestyle. The rules have changed a lot, embrace the freedom to build your home together and have fun with it. When in doubt, consult your family and friends for help, they will love it!

The Goods is more than a place to see our products. We’re here to tell the stories behind and beyond what we sell. When you visit our blog, you’ll meet artists, discover uncommon knowledge, immerse yourself in creative design, and get to know the people who keep UncommonGoods going strong.